Couple of questions about bootcamp!

I got my new MBP today and its awesome!

I am ready to install vista ultimate...here are my questions:

1. I got 2 discs with my MBP they are "Mac OS X instal disc 1" and "Mac OS X install disc 2". Someone said that there would be a driver disc for when I install vista. Are the drivers I need on one of those Mac OS X discs?

2. I have no idea how to use bootcamp...where do i get started? Is there a step by step guid to installing and configuring bootcamp? I did check the forums and found some helpfull stuff but could someone just spoonfeed me the juicy link? (thanks)

3. When I create bootcamp partitions how big should each one be? I have 168.64 gigs left on my 200gig HD right out of the box. I will be putting most of my games on the vista side as well as many of my work files etc so I think I want that one to be bigger. So what would be a good size to leave the other partition so I dont leave OS X unusable? I'd like to do photo/video work and some music stuff on the OS X side of things.

Thanks for your help!

 

Look at the sticky at the top of this forum for a guide.

Boot Camp Assistant is located in Applications -> Utilities (folder).

Run that, and it gets you started. As for your partitions.... to me it sounds like a 50-50 split might be ok. Maybe more if you're sure you won't need the space in OS X. Drivers for me were on my Leopard install disk since mine came with Tiger (this was when Leopard was just released), but for you it should be on Disk 1. It'll tell you which one to use. It's a very simple process.

Just be sure you format and install the correct partition when you insert the Vista disk.

 

1. Yes, one of the disks has the Boot Camp drivers.

2. Go to Applications>Utilities>Boot Camp Assistant and follow the instructions.
Alternatively, hold in Cmd (the apple key) and press spacebar, type Boot Camp, wait a few seconds, and press Enter. Then follow the instructions.

3. For Vista (with system recovery disabled) and games, I would think you need at least 50G, especially as some of the newer games require as much as 10GB HD space each. If you keep the system recovery partition, then you will need at least 100GB (as that takes up about 20% of your HD by default).

 

Hey Budding, where do I disable system recovery in Vista? I think that's where all my HDD space went Thought I just had too many games.

 

Disabling it is usually not the best move, what I did was resize it to about 5GB as follows:

1. Open Command Prompt as Administrator, just right click on the icon in Programs under the start menu and select Run As Administrator

2. type vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size] substituting [drive] with the drive you want to change System Recovery partition size on, and [size] with the size you want to set it to. In my case, it was:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=5GB

There is also a graphical way to do this, but I don't have a Vista box at hand right now.

 

Well I disabled it for the time being. If anything goes wrong I can always just reinstall. Even 5GB as a max size is a lot for me.....

Is it possible to set system restore to back up to an external drive? Because that seems like my best option.

 

I can currently not check whether there is a way to do this as I don't have a Vista box at hand. Perhaps you can try looking around Disk Manager by going to Start>Run and typing in DISKMGMT.MSC
Maybe there is an option for changing shadow copy location if you right click the drive letter and select Properties.

 

Thanks for all your help, Budding.